


The Brightest Heaven of Invention

by purplekitte



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Comfort Sex, M/M, PWP, Riding, Unremembered Empire, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 22:15:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplekitte/pseuds/purplekitte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guilliman needs Sanguinius to have something to believe in. Sanguinius knows his brother can't carry the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders all the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Brightest Heaven of Invention

**Author's Note:**

> _O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend_   
>  _The brightest heaven of invention,_   
>  _A kingdom for a stage, princes to act_   
>  _And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!_
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> No actual spoilers for _Unremembered Empire_ other than that these two characters both appear on the cover. It's not even out for more than six months. This isn't even heavy on speculation and the few things we do know.

‘If you trust me, then listen to me. You cannot turn your emotions off just because they are inconveniencing you. You can only suppress them. It’s not that you can’t do it; it’s that you’ll destroy yourself in the process.’

‘That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.’

Sanguinius shook his head. ‘I’m not asking if you’re willing to make self-sacrifice. There was never any doubt of that and it is only right to give of ourselves. I don’t want to see you hurt and then dismiss your moods as inconsequential. Primarchs can break. We’ve seen it.’

‘I don’t know what else to do,’ Guilliman admitted. Sometimes he felt despair or rage, but when there was nothing on hand to kill, what could you do about it except shake a fist at the heavens, and what did that do? Mostly he didn’t even feel that, just a cold absence and a vast emptiness under his feet.

‘I’m here for you, brother. _Let me_ be here for you.’

‘I don’t mean to be pushing you away. I don’t know what to do.’

He’d said the words like they weren’t much. As easily as he might say he did know what to do, he had deployment strategies and manuals of operations and plans for resource allocation. He could list through them point by point and item by item, every single one of them. Therefore he did know what to do and there was no reasons for those words or for the way his throat closed up and his eyes burned whenever he thought about it, before he pushed away the physiological responses and started organizing priorities.

His brothers called him cold, distant. He didn’t always mean to be this way, but he never could have reached out and closed the distant between them even when he wanted to. Sanguinius could, and Guilliman was grateful and always a little awed.

Sanguinius touched his face, his skin smoother than a warrior’s should be, and Guilliman leaned into it without precisely knowing what it meant.

‘Will you let me remind you what it’s like to take comfort in another? Are our bonds of brotherhood not still true?’

_There’s no one I can trust like you. There’s no one I can trust with myself and my weaknesses like you. You are better than me. I don’t know what to do. I need you. I can only deal with material concerns, I can only see what’s real and in front of me. I can create standards and routines, but they are nothing without some goal, something to believe in. Everything I once believed in is gone, except for you. I can’t have hope, so I can only cling to you._

‘Yes. Sanguinius...’ He trailed off. He’d always thought of himself as the wise son, but here he was as one who did not even know how to ask.

‘Roboute.’

Sanguinius leaned from his own chair even closer to Guilliman, his wings fanning around him, and pressed their lips together. It was neither hard and passionate nor light and playful, just sure and solid. It was exactly what he needed, someone who was steady and here and alive.

He couldn’t possibly express everything he felt, everything that had been building in him for months, years now, but he could this new sensation that curled inside him. It said things like _Help me_ and _I put myself in your hands_ and _I’ll protect you_ all at once. _Everyone looks at me and thinks I don’t need anyone because I don’t show it and I keep functioning, but you see. I don’t know what it is I need and everyone else is too overawed or lost themselves to offer it, whatever it is._

At some point Sanguinius had moved entirely from his chair onto Guilliman’s lap. His brother’s weight further emphasised that this was real, and it felt right to be putting his arms around his waist to support him.

Sanguinius licked past his lips and his mouth tingled. He studied how Sanguinius did it and returned the manoeuvre, Sanguinius’s tongue guiding him away from more than a brush against fangs.

Sanguinius pulled back to slip his hands under Guilliman’s shirt and pull it off over his head. He was already shirtless, as he often was when out of armour, something Guilliman rarely paid the slightest bit of attention to. People were either in power-armour or not, and details of the latter weren’t terribly important bits of information most of the time, though he analysed and filed them away, of course, in case.

Now he stared like he’d never seen his brother before. Never thought of him like this, at least.

‘You can touch.’

He wanted to touch Sanguinius’s wings. Of course he did; who didn’t? They were strange and beautiful and he wanted to trace each bone and muscle and tendon and feel exactly how they worked and fit together. Humans usually called mutation anything they found hideous or harmful. While pragmatic Guilliman didn’t know how to properly wax poetry about the angel and thought wings were not a particularly helpful feature in a species that had already invented the jump-pack, he felt something primal gazing upon him. To never appreciate beauty would be to be empty of all things good and be what his worst critics accused him of being.

He ran his hands over Sanguinius’s chest as his brother wrapped his arms over his shoulders. His anatomy was bird-like in some ways. A fused collarbone and disproportionately oversized keeled sternum, all his bones strong with ceramite and more exotic genetic engineering to make them as light as possible at the same time. His chest was thickly corded with muscle even for a primarch, all the extra or misaligned muscles for his wings changing the topology of his torso. Guilliman traced pectorals and felt the pull of medial supracoracoideus. No wonder his wings were so expressive of his moods, they’d have to shift with any other movement of his lungs or shoulders.

Guilliman continued on to his back, mapping muscle, and pressed his hands against the joints of his emergent wings. Sanguinius moaned in his ear. ‘You can do more of that.’

‘I’ve never done this before.’

‘That’s fine.’ Sanguinius smiled. ‘You know the theory, right?’

Guilliman felt his lips twitch in response. ‘Abstractly, yes.’

‘I’ll help you through the practical.’ Sanguinius ran a hand down Guilliman’s chest to stroke lightly over his stomach, and he could certainly feel the heat of desire building in him from the touch.

There was nothing wrong with sexual intercourse, abstractly. Neither common thought on Macragge nor the Terran popular culture of the Imperium was deeply obsessed with sex as unclean or sinful, though such beliefs were encountered fairly frequently in compliances. He had never bothered with it, the way he’d never bothered with most emotional displays many people felt necessary that he so rarely felt the desire for.

With Sanguinius’s encouragement, he explored his wings more, being careful to run his fingers with the grain of his feather. The skin between them was soft and smooth and touching there made Sanguinius shiver with excitement and show far more of his fangs than he normally would allow. His wings arched and spread, like someone who’d been still and cooped up for too long reaching out to stretch as far as they could. Guilliman used the space to comb his fingers through the feathers; long, stiff flight feathers above and short shocks of soft down below. Sanguinius cried out and pressed against him.

At least he could figure out when he was doing the right thing. And he had definitely confirmed Sanguinius’s wings were an erogenous zone. He filed away what actions brought about rustling trembling and what stronger flaps that excited the air around them.

Sanguinius meanwhile turned his hands to undressing them the rest of the way, attempting to do so while still straddling Guilliman. Guilliman gasped and bucked his hips as a hand wrapped around his hardening arousal. Sanguinius nuzzled his throat, and he’d rarely felt anything so distracting he couldn’t think of anything else as he did with the wet tongue lapping at his neck in time with the hand stroking his cock.

‘Roboute,’ Sanguinius whispered, smooth voice thick with desire. He meant to respond, but his breath caught as Sanguinius slowly lowered himself down onto him.

Sanguinius held him tightly as he adjusted to Guilliman’s cock inside him, making little sounds that were both gasps and moans. Guilliman stroked his back and the curve of where his wings rose from his shoulder blades. He didn’t want to hurt him. Sanguinius was strong enough to take it, but he never wanted to betray the trust he’d been given. He could feel Sanguinius smile against his skin and lean into the touch and begin to move again.

He felt amazing, hot and tight, straining against him, muscular legs flexing as he rode him. For the moment the angel wasn’t ethereal at all, having descended to the world of the purely physical, but in doing so he showed Guilliman the way to some transcendent feeling beyond the act itself.

Guilliman couldn’t turn off his thoughts, even when they said things he didn’t want to dwell on. Things like _He’s good at this, he’s done this before, he’s definitely done this with another primarch before_ , leading inevitably towards _He must have done this with Horus._ He felt sick to know they were treading the same path, but wasn’t about to condemn Sanguinius for it. They’d all counted Horus as a brother and nearly all of them as a friend. If Horus had ever expressed interest to _him_ , before, he would have...

Sanguinius bit him hard, sharp teeth sinking deeply into his shoulder. It should have hurt, it should have felt like an attack, but instead the sensation was too intense to differentiate between pain and pleasure and he arched into it and cried out as Sanguinius licked at his blood.

Sanguinius kissed him again, lips wet, and Guilliman ran hands through his hair as he pulled him closer. He could feel them both tremble, so close to the edge. Sanguinius’s wings fluttered and stretched fully open like he wanted to take to the air. He was so beautiful.

Sanguinius kept kissing him as Guilliman shuddered and came, swallowing his cries. It was almost too much as Sanguinius arched and clenched around him, finding his release moments later. His wings shook from exertion and over-stimulation.

They traded long and lingering kisses for much longer. It didn’t seem like an efficient use of time and they were still sticky, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull away or mentally go over his to-do list for other priorities. He wanted to do this. Sanguinius had given him permission to be selfish... to keep himself in optimum condition, right? He understood perfectly well the theory that periodic breaks increased overall productivity and lowered fatigue.

‘What do we do now?’

‘This is the part where I hold you until you stop feeling like the galaxy is falling out from under you.’

‘Ah. That’s going to take awhile.’

‘I know.’ He looked like he did. Like he felt the same. ‘That’s why I’m not going anywhere.’

He wanted to stay like this forever, even though that didn’t make any sense and eventually they would have to do other things and how was this even helping but he didn’t know what would help and maybe having someone be with him was the best anyone could do because nothing could be done really and he couldn’t even figure out how to scream or weep like he wanted to.

What a mess. Guilliman shook his head to push away the stream of badly articulated emotional outburst from his usually organised thoughts. He had to be strong and unshakable for everyone’s sake. Even Sanguinius’s. He had to give him a solid foundation from which to work. Sanguinius could tell him what the future was supposed to be like, and he could make a plan to step by step, day by day, bring that about.

The old Imperium was dead, but maybe they could keep what they had. It was too late to save it. But maybe they could hold out. Maybe they could make something new, though that was a dream he couldn’t imagine on his own. Maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> And then somehow Sanguinius ends up at the Siege but Guilliman isn't there in time. I see break-ups and more angst in the future as Sanguinius takes off after a tactically-unsound forlorn hope. Then more angst!


End file.
